I have jumped on it.  Halim had told me about this book a while back and recently I’ve heard others mention it and my friend, Becca, has been blogging about it.  Valley of Vision is a collection of Puritan prayers.  I thought it would be good to pick it up as an encouragement during this time when I feel I’m learning a lot about prayer.  I love the language that they use – thees, thous, thys.  I love how everything that they pray is saturated with Scripture – these people must have read and memorized their Bibles for-real style.  I think I’m going to try to read through one of these prayers a day and maybe pray about some of the things that I read.

This morning I read this part about God’s restraining grace in our sin:

“O God, it is amazing that men can talk so much about man’s creaturely power and goodness, when, if thou didst not hold us back every moment, we should be devils incarnate.  This, by bitter experience, thou hast taught me concerning myself.”

I blogged recently about the book, “A Praying Life” that has made a big impact on me.  One of the strategies that the author, Paul Miller, recommended was to create prayer cards.  Paul is totally speaking my language: give me notecards, categories, a mechanical pencil and an index card box and I am a happy little organizer.  He made the valid point that people often approach the majority of things in life with a plan, but rarely do this in prayer.

Man, has this impacted my praying.  I made several cards (he has a list in the book to help get you started): one for each member of my family, one for my friends, one for people whom I am praying for their salvation, one for my church, one for missions, one for ministries that you are involved in (for me, Get Trained), an adoption card (for beginning our search into where and when we’ll adopt), and a few others.

The cards are pretty simple.  I wrote down specific Scripture to pray on each of those cards and the best thing is, now that I’ve written it down, I remember those verses and end up praying those things throughout the day – even when I don’t have my cards with me.  I try to go through the cards once a day, but confess that it doesn’t always happen; I’m a beginner.  I’m also trying to be careful not to make it just a daily ritual of getting through my cards and checking it off my list.  I’m a bit of a legalist, so I’m prone to do that.  But, in addition to praying through the cards, I’ve also been asking for a while now that the Lord would give me a desire to pray – and I’ve seen this begin to develop.

So, as an example, here is the card that I am praying for myself (it definitely contains the most verses, because – well – I need a lot of prayer.)  I’m sure that the list of verses will grow as I continue this, but this is what I started with:

• Overall life:  ”And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to His purpose.” (Romans 8:28)
• Humility: “Do nothing from rivalry or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves.” (Philippians 2:3)
• Thought life: “take every thought captive to obey Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:5)
• Joy: “You make known to me the path of life; in your presence in fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore.” (Psalm 16:11)
• Mouth: “The mouth of the righteous is a fountain of life” (Proverbs 10:11)
• Transformation: “And be not conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect.” (Romans 12:2)

So, if you need a way to get your prayer life started, maybe this would work for you, too.

I read this book for two reasons: 1) I want to have a praying life and 2) Halim was reading it and I seem to enjoy taking books he is reading and finishing them before he can and then telling him all about them.  I doubt he enjoys this as much as I do.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who struggles with prayer, is growing weary in prayer, or is as cynical about prayer as I discovered that I am.  This book totally exposed my lack of faith that there is really power in praying – particularly the prayers that I pray.  But, it also encouraged me in how to turn this around and gave some really practical ways to do this.  I need practical.  I can already see a difference both in the way I pray, the amount I pray and the expectation that I have when I pray.

The author does a great job of providing Scripture and instruction about prayer along with his life experiences in a growing prayer life.  I was especially impacted by his prayers for his children over 20+ years.

This book is, I think, available in the resource area at the Stone.